Winter Workshops & Writing:
and a few extra thoughts...
WORKSHOPS & DISCUSSIONS
Please click through the links and listings below to the website for more information:
THE GROUP-GROUP: a discussion group gathered to support the participants in building community groups of various kinds: peer support groups, study groups, social and recreational groups, discussion and café groups, circle groups.
This group is designed to support lay people and community members and clinicians in building healthy, boundaried, well-designed non-clinicial community groups.
Six sessions, Monday evenings, starts November 4th
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CIRCLING THE DRAIN - LIVING INTENTIONALLY WITH MORTALITY
A workshop and peer discussion group designed for anyone who wants to expand their ability to withstand and accept existential realities, to develop healthier, more related responses to encounters with death and dying among their family, friends, in the wider community and culture, and just feel generally more peaceful and open-hearted in the face mortality.
Sixteen sessions, Tuesday evenings, starts Nov 12th
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COMMUNITY DISCUSSION: OLD FOOLS & INCOMPLETE MYTHS
Community discussions are one-time, recorded events: Ninety minute facilitated public discussions via Zoom, with opportunities for questions and response on specific topics.
The work of grief, loss, and aging is profoundly shaped by the dominant cultural myths of individuality and community, failure and success, power and weakness, victory and surrender - a discussion organized around a recent module I presented in a recent Pacifica Graduate Extension course on Conscious Aging:
Saturday mid-day, December 7th
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RIDING THE ROLLER COASTER: EMOTION AND CONTEMPLATION WORKSHOP
I originally considered calling this workshop “Beyond Mindfullness” as my primary intention was to look at other frames for considering and holding our emotional lives than those commonly promoted in most psychological conversations.
This discussion group will draw from various contemplative, meditative, and psycho-spiritual models for establishing “right relationship” - neither over- or under-valuing our emotional lives.
This is the second time I will be facilitating this this new workshop for the winter semester.
Five sessions, Wednesday evenings, starts Nov 6th
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Exploring dreams as a creative, contemplative, and community practice
10 weeks, Wednesday mid-day, starts Dec 4th
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WRITING:
SEMINAR & LECTIO SUBSCRIPTION:
If you want to sponsor my un-reimbursed labors - the free essays I share, the scholarships and pro bono services and workshop seats that I provide, this subscription is an excellent way to offer patronage and support. Two essays shared here each month.
You are welcome to read this preview of my subscription essay series: a re-examination of the symbolic, visionary and hallucinatory communications of the the dying: What is Death?
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A memoir, a meditation, an investigation through the mysteries of spiritual abuse:
This writing is a work of memory and imagination, of investigation and amateur detective work, of theological and psychological theory, of dreams, synchronicity, and bald conjecture, of encounters with death, grief, and illness, of coming to terms with the unknowable, the incomprehensible and the unforgivable.
The newest chapter: Chapter Four: Particularly The Tongue, has been posted. A “Reverie” follows each chapter, which will be shared soon.
I’ve placed this writing behind a one-time fee pay-wall to offer myself some level of internet privacy through this personal project.
And do have an essay in my drafts that I will share with the rest of my free essays in the next week or so.
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A FEW THOUGHTS:
I know that my writing process is intensely personal, diaristic, and perhaps seems vulnerable to those who read it. I was likely negotiating some real vulnerability as I wrote them. But I am not even slightly frightened of my own feelings, no matter how painful. Tending to them and finding the truth that exists at the very bottom has kept me alive, and preserved my heart through challenges that might have been annihilating otherwise.
But here is what I know about myself: I only share what I have already metabolized. I’ve extracted whatever I needed to from writing through the dilemma, or conflict that my words have wrestled with, and I am moving ahead through whatever comes next.
I share what I am done with - in case it is of use to others. By the time I’ve pressed “post” or “publish” whatever I’ve written is an emptied cocoon. I could simply leave it in my journal, in my book margins, in my notes file - and believe me, I do often enough.
I’ve learned that although my life has been organized around sorting through the psychological, spiritual and emotional thickets through my solitary practice of languaging, imagining, studying and journaling - that many people do not have words for the tangles they find themselves caught in. My profession, and the kind responses and comments that people share have convinced me that my written cast-offs can often be repurposed, shared and well-used by others who can use these words now more that I ever will again.
It seems odd to me to hoard them when I will never look back at them again, when some of the more integrated and coherent entries might be helpful to the wider community.
I say this because I think sometimes people misread my sharing, even worry about me, imagine me raw or in need when the act of writing something exposing, and deciding to share it explicitly means I am fine.
It doesn’t feel exposing to me because I am not there any more.
Writing it means I am leaving it behind.
I’m almost always handing down something that I have just out-grown and won’t need anymore and am onto trying on some new challenge that fits the moment.
I share and publish my words because it seems wasteful and selfish not to when others have told me that it is helpful to them. I’ve had a fairly unusual life, full of extreme and uncommon experiences. That means I’ve had to learn to negotiate rare challenges on my own, and transform them into something I can offer back to my community.
Making a sow’s ear into a silk purse means it isn’t a sow’s ear any more.
And who needs thousands of old purses laying around collecting dust?
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AN IMPORTANT NOTE:
I only post updates at Substack quarterly or less. If this is the primary place that you follow me, you will miss out on being informed about most of my writing, and many of my workshops and programming.
I would love for you to follow my own self-published newsletter from my own platform - about news and events, community resources, photos and receive my newest un-paywalled essays.
I send out emails from there about three times a month, so I won’t clog up your already overflowing inbox too much: